Category Archives: Dallas City Council

A 'Turkey for Toll Roads' hands fliers out to attendants of Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings' breakfast announcement about a possible new vision for the Trinity toll road at Babb Bros BBQ & Blues in Dallas..

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings this morning asked people packed into a West Dallas barbecue joint to support an effort in which the “best design minds in the world” will rethink unspecified elements of the divisive Trinity toll road.

But what remains unclear is how much the panel of urban planners and transportation experts who meet next month will be able to change the road. Local officials have already submitted detailed specifications to federal authorities, who will decide next year whether or not Trinity Parkway can be built.

Rawlings said federal officials’ ongoing review of the plans is the perfect time to “pivot” and make sure the road’s design is “right for the city.”

“I’ve said I only want to be a part of something that is significant and truly additive, not only for mobility but for aesthetics and economic development,” he told more than 100 people at Babbs Bros BBQ & Blues.

Much of the opposition to the road centers the shelf it will have to sit on, its width within Trinity River levees and its wall meant to minimize flooding. Critics say those elements are essentially hostile to the grand park city leaders want to build within the levees. Many of the city’s hoped-for recreational amenities will fall between the road’s flood wall and the river itself.

Three people dressed as turkeys stood outside Wednesday’s breakfast, mocking the mayor’s support for the controversial road and handing out fliers that said the road would hinder downtown developed.

Rawlings said after his speech that he doesn’t know what flexibility the city has at this point in making design changes. He wants the panel that will spend a few days rethinking the plan to have leeway in their vision.

“Why not treat this project with an optimistic sense of the possible?” he said.

Almost none of the funding for the $1.5 billion project (as its currently designed) has been determined yet. The North Texas Tollway Authority won’t determine whether it is financially feasible until after federal authorities give clearance to build it.

But Rawlings said he wants to put those factors aside. He said there are a lot of projects in Dallas that would have ended up being mediocre if financing details preceded overarching vision.

“I want to stand in the Trinity, look back toward downtown and say, ‘That’s cool, that’s beautiful,’” he said. “That’s what I want.”

So what does he consider cool and beautiful?

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a design person.”

Trinity toll road opponents who heard his speech called it political theater meant to squelch growing opposition to the road ahead of next year’s City Council elections. Rawlings has not yet announced if he will seek a second term.

“It’s not a popular position right now to be pro-toll road,” said Angela Hunt, a former council member who led a failed 2007 voter referendum aimed at blocking the road’s construction.

Council member Philip Kingston questioned whether anything that comes out of next month’s design summit could ever be implemented given that detailed road schematics have already been submitted for approval.

The Dallas City Council’s transportation committee on Monday is slated to spend four hours discussing an overhaul of transportation-for-hire rules. The council has been wrangling for more than a year with a rewrite of its ordinances that deal with car-for-hire companies including taxis, limos and app-based services like Uber and Lyft.

The council faced public backlash after almost passing a previous rewrite that many said would have put the app-based services that are wildly popular with 20-somethings out of business. Transportation committee member Sandy Greyson then spent months working with several city officials and business leaders to hammer out a set of rules that gave the city some oversight over the companies, but also let the private entities compete against each other on an even playing ground.

The rules aim to require enough insurance to protect passengers but not make being an app-based driver cost prohibitive. They also hope to put drivers of all companies through a uniform background check.

The Transportation and Trinity River Project Committee will discuss the latest on the overhaul at 5 p.m. Monday in Room 6ES of City Hall, 1500 Marilla St. Assistant police chief Charles M. Cato is expected to spend more than three-and-a-half hours presenting the proposed new rules.

Angela Hunt and Alex Krieger following the Harvard professor's apology for suggesting the "parkway" that has become the massive Trinity River toll road

Alex Krieger, urban design professor at Harvard and co-author of Dallas’ decade-old Balanced Vision Plan for the Trinity River, said Friday that a six-lane, nine-mile-long high-speed toll road between the levees is a very, very bad idea. And, speaking to an audience of city officials and policy-makers and architects, he apologized for having played a part in the plan that initially proposed a smaller, four-lane “parkway” that has ballooned into a $1.5-billion massive highway that would likely restrict access to the other amenities proposed in the 2003 plan.

Said Krieger to a hearty round of applause, the road Dallas City Hall has long been pushing for “would be detrimental to the Trinity corridor and probably would not serve traffic particularly well long-term in Dallas.”

Krieger was but one of several urban designers, traffic planners and engineers speaking during AIA Dallas’ daylong “Choices for a 21st Century Dallas: Connecting People and Opportunities” event held Friday at the Latino Cultural Center. Also on the list: Michael Morris, transportation director for the North Central Texas Council of Governments and longtime Trinity River toll road proponent; Dallas City Council member Lee Kleinman; Gail Thomas, president of the Trinity Trust; and Patrick Kennedy, who’s been pushing for the removal of Interstate 345 between Deep Ellum and downtown.

But Krieger’s appearance was perhaps the most anticipated, if only because of his role in proposing the parkway. And he began his remarks by offering an apology — “a sincere one,” he said — to the citizens of Dallas.

Then-Mayor Laura Miller at a January 2004 panel with Alex Krieger, at right, discussing the future of the Trinity River

“I feel I persuaded a number of people who were skeptical about any road within the Trinity River corridor that a particular kind of road might be a good thing for the Trinity,” he said. “I sill believe that. But that’s not what is transpiring a number of years later.” Said Krieger, he still believes in a slow-moving, four-lane road that provides access to the Trinity River park below. But that concept, he said, has morphed “into an idea I don’t think is very good.”

To anyone who’s been paying attention in recent years, Krieger’s comments aren’t particularly surprising. In May 2007 then-Dallas City Councilmember Angela Hunt, who was leading the anti-toll road referendum, turned up an email Krieger sent to then-Mayor Laura Miller in March of that year in which he said he was “concerned” that “the engineering of the road was proceeding as if it were a great big interstate highway instead of a parkway and that there was absolutely no evidence of concern for the ‘context sensitive design’ that was promised as part of the Balanced Vision Plan.”

But Krieger didn’t publicly voice his concerns, and didn’t stand beside Hunt as she fought city officials, including Miller and her successor, Tom Leppert, to kill the toll road. When asked after his presentation why he didn’t offer this public apology seven years ago — when, just maybe, he could have helped kill the expansive toll road — Krieger said only that he was “not really aware of” Hunt’s efforts against the toll road.

“That’s difficult to accept,” says Hunt. “But do I think he owes me an apology? No, I don’t. I do think he owes Dallas residents an apology, and I am glad he came to town and offered that. Part of me says this is seven years too late. … At the same time, I don’t think we should dismiss him, and I think we should appreciate the fact he did come to town.” Continue reading →

Update @ 2:30 p.m.:
Meeting has started off with remarks from local officials.

Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, who presides over the commissioners court, said he’s happy with the way studies on Interstate 345′s future is shaping up.

“I like the way this study is incorporating people from the real estate council,” he said.

Jenkins also alluded to a conversation with TxDOT officials who said they know how a $200 million affects a local economy but now want to study how $200 million invested in rail projects or the Inland Port would affect an economy.

“I think that’s a smart way of looking at it,” Jenkins said.

Update @ 2:43 p.m.:
Brian Barth, TxDOT’s district engineer door Fort Worth, said North Texas has $12.5 billion worth of projects under construction. Officials are working on plans for $30 billion more.

Many of those projects are adding tolled lanes alongside existing free lanes. They involve private developers who are using expected toll revenues to finance construction costs of expansions and renovations.

Barth said the area may have “more than our fair share” of road projects, but it’s because they plan smart and agencies work well together.

“We’ve leveraged public dollars to get a lot more projects built,” Barth said.

Update @ 3:15 p.m.:
State Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, reinforced Collin County officials’ opposition to turning Central Expressway’s carpool lanes into managed toll lanes. And he said that he and several of his colleagues in the Texas House and Texas Senate are committed to fixing the state’s transportation funding woes.

“We believe transportation funding is a problem that must addressed head on in the next legislative session,” he said.

But Leach didn’t detail how they plan to do that considering lawmakers for decades have failed to develop substantial solutions to fund transportation. Those repeated failures begot the current influx of toll roads and toll lanes in North Texas.

Update @ 3:45 p.m.:
I caught Leach to ask him about how to pay for transportation funding without adding tolls. He said there’s already movement underway to address funding problems.

Leach wants to stop diverting gas tax revenues to non-transportation other uses. He also wants to send sales tax revenues from auto parts to transportation funds. He also plans to author a bill that would send any growth in state tax revenues on car sales to transportation needs.

Leach said he currently does not support raising gas tax revenues because there is so many other ways to fund transportation without creating any new fees or taxes.

The Cotton Belt runs from Fort Worth to Plano. Fort Worth plans to have service on its leg from downtown to the airport in 2018. DART is trying to figure out how to get service on its portion from the airport to Plano.

The region’s largest transit agency is seeking consensus from its members cities so that it can move forward with finding funding for service along the line, which runs from Fort Worth to Plano. Cotton Belt service could connect Plano to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport without forcing riders to go south into downtown Dallas, then west to Irving. If rail service is used, it would also give Addison the trains it’s waited 31 years to see roll through town.

At a meeting of the Dallas council’s Transportation and Trinity River Project Committee, Vonciel Jones Hill said that if Dallas doesn’t get involved, other member cities will move forward with their ideas.

“Dallas is either in or not,” said Hill, who chairs the transportation committee. “If Dallas is in, we need to start looking at what the benefits are.”

But committee member Sandy Greyson said DART can’t get service on the Cotton Belt without Dallas. A portion of the line runs through Far North Dallas as it connects Addison to Richardson.

Greyson said possible stations identified in her district would not benefit the city because the areas are either built out or are not conducive to transit-oriented-development. She said DART should bore under a portion of LBJ Freeway to make an east-west connection. Greyson said it could then run north to Addison and then west along the Cotton Belt.

That idea didn’t sit well with Hill.

“Dallas loses its economic benefit,” Hill said.

“There is no economic benefit,” Greyson interjected.

“That’s your opinion Ms. Greyson,” Hill shot back.

“And that other is your opinion,” Greyson said.

Greyson moved that the committee direct city staff to work with DART on getting service along LBJ within Dallas city limits. The motion failed after only colleague Monica Alonzo joined her. Committee member Lee Kleinman then moved to have DART and city staff proceed with finding funding for Cotton Belt service. Hill and committee members Tennell Atkins and Sheffie Kadane agreed, passing the motion in a 4-2 vote.

Atkins walked out as he voted, reportedly for a prior commitment. As Hill moved on to other business, Greyson and Alonzo walked out. Before they did, Greyson shouted that Hill didn’t have enough members present to continue the meeting. Hill apologized on her colleagues’ behalf that the disagreement escalated to visible disappointment and frustration.

Moments after the meeting ended, Greyson was back in the committee room as she and Hill argued about the matter some more.

Hill asked Greyson if she doesn’t believe city staff that there are economic development opportunities along the line in Far North Dallas.

“No, they don’t live there,” Greyson said.

Greyson then asked Hill, who represents southern Dallas neighborhoods like Mountain Creek and West Oak Cliff, if she’d visited the Cotton Belt area.

“Yes ma’am,” Hill said.

Kleinman jumped in and told Greyson that her plan isn’t viable, especially considering DART has no funds yet identified for even a portion of the Cotton Belt.

“Then let’s not build it,” says council member Philip Kingston, who is one a handful of council members opposed to the toll road. Voters approved the toll road during a contentions 2007 referendum spearheaded by his predecessor, Angela Hunt. And city officials will tell you: Even if the road were approved tomorrow by all the agencies involved, there’s no money to build it.

The study, done in conjunction with the Texas Department of Transportation and the North Texas Tollway Authority and initially expected in January 2013, appears to give Dallas City Hall what it has always wanted: a somewhat clearer path toward building a nearly nine-mile-long toll road along the east levee of the Trinity River. But it’s still a bumpy one: Not only does the city lack the more than $1.5 billion or so it needs to build the road, but the FHWA still wants to evaluate the toll road’s impact on the wetlands and the floodplains between the levees, which were rated unacceptable by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2009.

Click to enlarge the study area impacted by the Trinity Parkway.

In fact, the FHWA says in the massive document that general policy “would not favor such an alternative” at all. The environmental impact study says it’s recommending the route “for further evaluation” based solely on “a unique set of factors that warrant favoring an alternative with significant and longitudinal encroachments of the Dallas Floodway.”

According to the report, the federal government has allowed the so-called Alternative 3C to survive this long because the toll road has been designed “to avoid any substantial impacts to the ability of the Dallas Floodway to perform its fundamental mission of safely conveying floodwaters from extreme storm events past the Dallas CBD.” Also, says the study, the toll road has been “a prominent aspect of City of Dallas planning for over four decades.”

Says Kingston, “It doesn’t seem responsible to allow Dallas’ zeal to build this road to affect an outcome of an environmental impact statement.”

Says FHWA spokesman Doug Hecox, the EIS is “a key part of all the approvals the project will require. The FEIS is a milestone.”

Hecox says barring any surprises during an April 24 public hearing, the FHWA expects Alternative 3C will be the agency’s option — just as it’s always been Dallas’.

Jill Jordan, the assistant city manager long tasked with spearheading the Trinity River Corridor Project at Dallas City Hall, is delighted by the FHWA’s final recommendation despite its caveats.

“As you know 3C has been the preferred option for the city for quite some time,” she says. “We were hopeful the record of decision would point in the direction of 3C, and the fact they’re getting to that conclusion eventually supports the city’s position and desired outcome.” Continue reading →

I’ve been emailing back and forth with a taxpayer who has a beef with the fact that DART does not post recordings of its meetings on line.

He’s got a good point, and I’ll go one further: Why doesn’t the board of a $1 billion-a-year enterprise webcast its meetings as well? Most of DART’s constituent cities either have their council meetings carried on cable, webcast, or both.

DART needs to enter the technology era on this one. Its committee-of-the-whole and full board meetings, at the very least, should be webcast and archived.

I emailed over to DART spokesman Morgan Lyons today and asked him if the board ever discussed going online with its meetings and/or archiving them. He said no. I asked if the staff recorded its meetings for internal purposes, such as creating meeting minutes. He said yes.

In this year’s legislative session, state Rep. Pat Fallon of Frisco authored a bill to require any city, county or school district over 50,000 to record and post meetings online. It was

Good points, and I’m grateful he raised them.

Wouldn’t it be something if the DART board didn’t wait until a new state law told them they had to go online and they did it themselves?

There are myriad transportation agencies spread throughout several municipalities keeping an eye on the day-to-day doings along N. Central Expressway, among them the cities of Dallas, Highland Park, Richardson and Plano; Dallas Area Rapid Transit; the Texas Department of Transportation and the North Texas Tollway Authority. But beginning next month, just one will be in charge of gathering and dispensing all of that information to folks who use U.S. 75: DART, which has spent several years and millions of dollars in an effort to make riding Central — or avoiding it altogether — easier for commuters.

It’s called Integrated Corridor Management, which is just what it sounds like: DART will take everything it knows — and what everyone else knows — about conditions along Central and warn motorists when they need to hop off the expressway and take a frontage road or Greenville Avenue, where the timing of traffic lights will be altered to handle a heavier load, or just maybe hop a DART train instead. They will be told when and where traffic is being diverted, and why. And they will be told when to expect delays in the future. This will be done in several different ways, most notably with a new website — 511DFW.com — that will launch in coming weeks.

“It’s information-sharing for the commuter,” says DART spokesman Morgan Lyons, “which is the easiest way to describe Integrated Corridor Management. Right now it’s not as coordinated as it could be. The idea is to catch people sooner. If you’re about to pull on to Central and you’re in the access road and find out there’s an accident, it’s a little late. Now we can intercept that motorist earlier and say maybe you want to come down Coit, maybe you want to take Greenville, maybe you want to take transit. It answers the question: How can we share information and push that out to commuters?”

“You do get that information, but it’s from a lot of different sources,” says Lyons. “And that works pretty well if you just travel in one jurisdiction. But right now nothing pulls all those bits of information together. By doing that I get a more complete picture of what’s going on in my commute. It gives people a more complete picture of what’s going on. It’s not different from the flat newspaper and the online newspaper: You can give people are richer experience.” Continue reading →

Commuters cross the tracks after getting off a DART train at West End Station in downtown Dallas, Tuesday, January 10, 2012.

Dallas Area Rapid Transit is once again evaluating possible paths for a second downtown Dallas line, even though it will likely be a decade or more before the congestion-easing project becomes a reality.

The reboot comes courtesy of a $700,000 federal grant DART recently secured. And officials are including a few new options this time around to account for new variables: the convention center hotel, streetcar lines and the prospect of a high-speed rail stop.

“Rather than rush to an alignment, we decided to take some more time based on these changed conditions and make sure that all these projects complement each other,” said Stephen Salin, DART’s vice president of rail planning.

This map shows six proposed alternative DART alignments through downtown Dallas. The other two, including one with elevated tracks, are variations on B4. Click to get a better look.

Make no mistake: The alternative line project, which could cost from $500 million to $1 billion, remains unfunded. And unless officials hit the jackpot in pursuing federal dollars, tangible progress won’t start until 2025, 2030 or later.

But DART officials want to firm up plans ahead of time, especially since the addition of another downtown alignment would have huge implications for the agency.

Downtown Dallas currently serves as a choke point for DART’s light rail, as all four lines must share the same track between the West End and Pearl/Arts District stations. That limits the numbers of trains and riders, but it also leaves DART more vulnerable to delays.

“All I need is a fire downtown or some other interruption in service and everything comes to a grinding halt,” Salin said.

DART’s 2010 study came up with four possible alignments. All four branched off from Victory Station, cruised past the now-built Perot Museum of Nature and Science, swung near City Hall and then connected with the Deep Ellum Station.

The city of Dallas then proposed in the Downtown Dallas 360 plan a different alignment that branched off just before Union Station and then headed toward the Deep Ellum Station.

Some are old. Some are new. Some branch off Victory Station. Some branch off near Union Station. Some have five new stations. Some have only four. Most are a mixture of underground and at-grade tracks.One uses elevated tracks.

DART officials hope to gather more public feedback over the next few months and then have a report assessing the possible alignments. After that? Well, then it’s time to wait for funding and see if any new challenges pop up.

“Working in the downtown area, all you need to occur is for more development to occur faster than we can create the alignment and then I have start all over again,” Salin said.

Please see after the jump to view more detailed maps of the various alternative alignments.

Passengers exit the McKinney Avenue trolley at the trolley turnaround near Central Expressway and enter the DART CityPlace train station during the Friday evening commute in Dallas on Friday, December 7, 2012.

Plans to expand the route of Dallas’ soon-to-be-constructed streetcar line and link the Bishop Arts District and Dallas Convention Center are now fully funded.

The Regional Transportation Council, part of the North Central Texas Council of Governments, approved on Thursday reallocating nearly $31 million in state funds previously set aside for a rail connector system at Love Field.

The money, which had languished unused for years, will now be applied toward purchasing two streetcars, extending the line south to Zang Boulevard and Davis Street near Bishop Arts and stretching the line east to Young and Wood streets near the convention center hotel.

Previous streetcar plans had the line going only 1.5 miles from Colorado Boulevard and Beckley Avenue to Union Station.

“This really is a momentous occasion for the city of Dallas,” said City Council member Linda Koop, also a member of the Regional Transportation Council. “We are trying to make our downtown more dense, and we are coming up with different transportation solutions to and meet that need.”

A $23 million federal grant for the project was first announced nearly three years ago. An additional $25 million in federal and local funding — including about $22 million DART reallocated last year to the streetcar line from the Love Field connector project — has since been applied toward the first phase.

Federal guidelines require that the initial stretch be completed by October 2014.

But there’s long been a desire to expand the streetcar line through Oak Cliff and downtown Dallas and connect it with the existing McKinney Avenue Trolley. Officials said Thursday the 0.7-mile extension was a good step in that direction.

“This is the kind of project that is a game changer,” said William Velasco, a member of both the Regional Transportation Council member and the DART board. “All over the country, these streetcar projects are bringing huge amounts of economic development.”

Officials are still working on a plan to better link DART’s Green Line to Love Field, and Koop said there should be more details on that in the coming weeks.

But there was concern that state officials might reclaim the funding awarded for the airport connector, if left unused much longer. So officials decided to put the money in action on the streetcar line.